#FF Rush? He's tweeting @limbaugh

During the third hour of his show Thursday afternoon, the conservative radio host announced that he planned to dip his toes into the Twitterverse by officially sending out his first tweet - and minutes later, he did.

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“Everybody has been asking me what they can do to help in all of this, and I’ve been saying, nah, just do what you’ve been doing just, if you listen, keep listening, that’s fine, but … there’s an army out there that wants to be mobilized, and so, I figured, use Twitter for it. I’m just going to put some things on Twitter that you can help us circulate. It’s that simple you just retweet them,” he said.

Shortly after his show concluded, @limbaugh sent out his very first tweet: “Here’s how the opposition astroturfs advertisers. Smart piece from @LegInsurrection Pls. Retweet bit.ly/y6Tnnv @mmfa” — the message was quickly retweeted by 50 plus Twitter users.

The link in this tweet is a blog post written by Cornell Law School professor William Jacobson called “Media Matters astroturfed the Limbaugh secondary boycott.”

Jacobson told POLITICO Thursday afternoon that based on some simple traffic analysis, the website Legal Insurrection was running some 5,000 page views an hour, with most of the traffic coming from Twitter. “I’m getting all sorts of Twitter traffic that I’m not used to getting,” he said. “Five thousand an hour is a lot for me, even during the day.”

Jacobson, who says he listens to at least a part of Limbaugh’s radio show on most days and whose Twitter handle, @LegInsurrection, was included in Limbaugh’s tweet, said he also gained about 200 new followers in just a few hours.

The account @limbaugh — labeled “The Only Genuine Rush Limbaugh Twitter Feed” — had some 102,000 followers as Limbaugh was announcing his plan to start tweeting. In about half an hour, that figure had quickly jumped to over 103,000. According to metadata associated with the account, it was created in February, 2009.

“I’ve had a Twitter account just to lock it up, a genuine Rush Limbaugh Twitter account, not a fake phony one, just to keep it under my domain control,” Limbaugh explained on his show Thursday.

For the benefit of anyone unfamiliar with Twitter, the radio host also explained that signing up for an account was free. “If you want to — it’s totally up to you. I’m not going to be a daily tweeter,” he added.

So what can followers of Limbaugh’s Twitter account expect to see? No pictures of what the radio host’s having for breakfast, that’s for sure.

“I’m not going to be hanging on Twitter 15 hours a day and tweeting, ‘Just had breakfast, have a wonderful day! Bye! Here’s a picture of me eating some cornflakes!’ None of that stuff,” he said. “Just things I want people to see and there’s a really good one today that I want people to see, and I’m going to tweet it out.”

Based on the enthusiasm of his fan base, Limbaugh will likely draw thousands more followers in a short span of time, and create plenty of buzz through the popular networking tool.

It was only recently that the radio host had also gotten a taste of how damaging Twitter can be. In the wake of his “slut” comment about Georgetown University law student Sandra Fluke, thousands of Twitter users mobilized – largely unifying behind the #BoycottRush – to bombard companies whose ads were running on “The Rush Limbaugh Show.” As a result, dozens of advertisers pulled their commercials from the program.